THE HEARTLESS STONE: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORLD OF DIAMONDS, DECEIT, AND DESIRE | Tom Zoellner | St. Martin’s
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The business practices of the London-based De Beers cartel are meticulously dissected: the artificial supply controls that maintain an illusion of scarcity; the marketing blitz through which it conquered the indifferent market of Japan; the crushing blows it deals to any upstart competitor. There’s a lot of engaging trivia here–so-called “champagne” diamonds are a crafty rebranding of the relatively worthless dingy brown diamonds of Australia’s Barramundi Gap, one of a handful of successful efforts on the part of diamond producers to evade the De Beers stranglehold. But the book’s great strength comes in its discussion of blood diamonds, the gems smuggled daily out of African republics awash in poverty and violence.
In 2001 the industry adopted a set of regulations, dubbed the Kimberley Process, designed to ensure that all new gems on the market are “clean”–i.e., not mined in the middle of civil war. But in one efficient, ruthless chapter Zoellner reduces the process to an elaborate charade in which customs records are doctored, flight plans are fudged, stones are stolen, swallowed, or shoved up the ass, and blind eyes are turned all around. The end result: “The diamond that goes on to sparkle on the left hand of a bride on a country club dance floor in Minnesota may once have been pulled from the lower intestine of a slain Congolese miner like a pearl out of an oyster.” Though in his concluding pages Zoellner tries again to elevate the diamond to quasi-mystical status–“the one shining irreducible moment in clear carbon that is supposed to make us forget our failings and mortality”–it’s the image of that miner and thousands like him that endures. –Martha Bayne
Feige’s explicit agenda is to underline the abstract idea of judicial fallibility with concrete examples. Lots of innocent people are arrested and go to jail, and as Feige illustrates, it’s not always for obvious reasons like faulty witness memory. The system is so packed and constipated that judges and DAs try to keep as many cases away from a full jury trial as possible; even the innocent are sometimes advised to throw up their hands and plea-bargain, “confessing” to crimes they didn’t commit rather than cool their heels in the courthouse another day. (Readers of Steve Bogira’s Courtroom 302 may find this familiar terrain.)
Shah notes right off the bat, “There’s nothing terrible about the truth that medical research imposes burdens,” and she and her family, she notes, have benefited from modern drugs. But the processes that bring these drugs to market can be sordid.
